Mendez v. Westminster
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Mendez v. Westminster, 64 F.Supp. 544 (D.C. Cal. 1946), aff'd, 161 F.2d 774 (9th Cir. 1947), was a 1947 court case that challenged racial segregation in California schools. It its ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal, in an en banc decision, held that the segregation of Mexican and Mexican American students into separate "Mexican schools" was unconstitutional.
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[edit] Background
On March 2, 1945, five Mexican-American fathers (Gonzalo Mendez, Thomas Estrada, William Guzman, Frank Palomino, and Lorenzo Ramirez) challenged the practice of school segregation in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. They claimed that their children, along with 5,000 other children of "Mexican and Latin descent", were victims of unconstitutional discrimination by being forced to attend separate "Mexican" schools in the Westminster, Garden Grove, Santa Ana, and El Modena school districts of Orange County.
Judge Paul J. McCormick ruled in favor of Mendez and his co-plaintiffs on February 18, 1946. However, the district appealed. Several organizations joined the appellate case as amicus curiae, including the NAACP, represented by Thurgood Marshall. More than a year later, on April 14, 1947, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal affirmed the district court's ruling.
[edit] The appellate ruling
The Ninth Circuit ruled only on the narrow grounds that, although California law provided for segregation of students, it only did so for "children of Chinese, Japanese or Mongolian parentage." And because "California law does not include the segregation of school children because of their Mexican blood," therefore it was unlawful to segregate the Mexican children.
Presumably, then, the same lawsuit if filed by "Chinese, Japanese or Mongolian" children would have the opposite result. This was remedied on June 14 of the same year, when California Governor and future Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren signed into law a repeal of the last remaining school segregation statutes in the California Education Code. Thus ended "separate but equal" in California schools, and with it school segregation.
Seven years later, Brown v. Board of Education held "separate but equal" schools to be unconstitutional, thus ending school segregation throughout the United States.
[edit] Sources
- Wollenberg, Charles. All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. Chapter 5, "The Decline and Fall of Separate But Equal." Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976
- David S. Ettinger, The History of School Desegregation in the Ninth Circuit, 12 Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 481, 484-487 (1979)
[edit] External links
- District court ruling. Retrieved on 2006-09-11.
- Ninth Circuit opinion (PDF). Retrieved on 2006-09-11.
